Lindbergh

by A. Scott Berg

  By the end of the year, the Darien house was finished as well. With its three small bedrooms, a modest living room, and an efficient kitchen, it cost $60,000, plus another $20,000 for its only extravagance—a bomb shelter, which Lindbergh had spent weeks researching and designing, right down to a drainpipe large enough to accommodate any tidal waves caused by a mega-tonnage underwater burst along the coastline.

  “For a man who wanted a simple life,” Land Lindbergh later observed, “it kept getting so complicated. Father was so busy setting up these little houses—enclaves really … but he found he couldn’t stay in them. After a few weeks at most, he’d have to take off. The life he set up for his family just didn’t work for him.” While the new chalet afforded everybody in the family a European base, it only encouraged the instability that made Anne feel insecure. “Chalet living,” she wrote, “showed us how free life can be in the smaller, barer setting: how burdened we had become at home by the accumulations and traditions of 20 years in our old family house.” But the addition of this small house further subjected her to that aspect of her husband’s routine that she detested most, having to uproot herself whenever she felt she was settling in.

  Leading lives on two continents increased the lack of communication between them. Although they now made two carbon copies of every letter they still regularly wrote to each other—one sent to each house—the Lindberghs seemed to miss more signals than they received. “I can see that in a few years I shall be living alone most of the time,” Anne wrote her friend Mina Curtiss in 1961. She was already adjusting by looking out for herself. Charles called from Germany one night hoping to spend the weekend skiing with Anne, then in Switzerland; but she had already booked herself into a hotel in Locarno for two weeks. Though she was disappointed to tears over the “dream of a shared joy,” she did not change her plans. “It was quite sad to come back & find you gone,” Anne wrote Charles during one of her returns to Connecticut, “with only the suit-to-be-cleaned sitting on your side of the bed!”

  In late 1963, young Anne sorted out her romantic life enough to leave Radcliffe and return to France, where she had fallen in love with a French student, the son of a Paris university professor. She and Julien Feydy married in a civil ceremony in the town hall of Douzillac, in the Dordogne, where Professor Feydy owned a castle. Although Lindbergh had great reservations about his twenty-three-year-old daughter’s marriage—what with her history of unstable love affairs—he stood at his wife’s side at the wedding. After the young couple had settled into married life in France, the bride’s mother presented some provocative new thoughts on marriage, specifically her own. “I do not really think happiness is the point of marriage,” she wrote Ansy, emphasizing other qualities, such as challenging one another and never being bored. “Actually, I think I am just beginning to understand your father, after all these years, & he perhaps, me. (Understanding is a very different thing from the deep bond between us which has always been there.)” Now that he was living his life completely by his own rules, even their friends who were privy to their marital strains found Charles more at ease than they had seen in years. Anne, having stopped trying to conform to his every wish, exuded a new sense of equanimity as well.

  Lindbergh had long since concluded that “the only way I could concentrate on my fundamental interests, and live the type of life I believed in,” required him to stop giving addresses or taking part in public ceremonies. His new itinerancy, on top of his penchant for privacy, made it all the easier to reject invitations of any kind, especially the institutional affairs—a gala celebrating the fortieth anniversary of Time from Henry Luce, a dinner honoring fifty years of Pulitzer Prize winners, and Senator Barry Goldwater’s personal invitation to attend a rally sponsored by the Young Americans for Freedom, whose theme was “world liberation from Communism.” When Adlai Stevenson invited Lindbergh to serve on the host committee of a tribute for their mutual friend Robert Hutchins, Lindbergh replied, “I like and admire Bob Hutchins too much to be willing to take part in inflicting a formal dinner upon him.”

  Nobody was more eager to entertain the Lindberghs than John F. Kennedy, whose father had held him in such high regard. Although Lindbergh had halfheartedly voted for Richard Nixon in the 1960 election, the young President issued Lindbergh a blanket invitation to visit the Oval Office. In April 1962, he formally invited the Lindberghs to a state dinner in honor of the French Minister of State in charge of Cultural Affairs, André Malraux. So eager was the President to have Lindbergh attend, the Kennedys asked him and his wife to spend the night at the White House. At Anne’s insistence, they accepted. Charles grumbled not only that he had to buy a tuxedo but that he would no longer be able to answer invitations saying, “[I]t is seven years since I have gone to a formal dinner!”

  Anne and Charles flew from New York and took a taxi to the White House. Their bags were whisked away at the pillared entrance, and they were escorted upstairs. At the end of a long corridor filled with historical pictures and mementoes, Mrs. Kennedy’s secretary threw open a door and said, “The Queen’s room for Mrs. Lindbergh”; then gesturing across the hall, “and the Lincoln room for Mr. Lindbergh.” Anne cried out, “So far away!”

  They were both put into the Queen’s room, which they found plenty spacious, “sunny and welcoming.” A maid entered with tea; and the Lindberghs perused the list of guests they would be joining that night, more than a hundred people from the worlds of art, music, theater, dance, and literature. They also received a penciled note from Mrs. Kennedy, asking them to cocktails before dinner.

  Ushered down the hall to the Oval Room, they joined the Vice President and Lady Bird Johnson, members of the French Embassy, and the Malraux for drinks. They could not help being impressed by the easy charm of the President and the regal beauty of Mrs. Kennedy, who swept into the room in a long stiff pink gown, bare-shouldered, her hair done up high with a diamond star. A few minutes later, the Lindberghs and the other guests were escorted to the main reception hall, which was filled with the cultural elite. Many they knew—Archibald MacLeish, David Rockefeller, and Thornton Wilder; many more they but recognized—Leonard Bernstein, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and Julie Harris. Anne had not been so giddy at a social affair in years, gushing in admiration as she was introduced to Adlai Stevenson and suddenly seeing his jaw muscles freeze, the same paralysis she had seen countless times as people had rushed to her husband over the years. Lindbergh adopted his standard party air, reserved but polite. He was as famous as anybody in the room but unrecognized by many who had no idea that the tall, lean gentleman with the wisps of white hair combed over his mostly bald head was Charles Lindbergh. He was seated at the President’s table, next to the French Ambassador’s wife, along with Madame Malraux, Agnes de Mille, Edmund Wilson, Andrew Wyeth, Geraldine Page, and Irwin Shaw.

  After dinner, toasts were exchanged—Kennedy saying this would be the first speech in the White House about French-American relationships that would not mention Lafayette. The guests then withdrew to the large reception room which had been transformed into a concert chamber, with rows of chairs. Amid the nation’s most famous names, Lindbergh was suddenly swarmed by members of the press. He politely explained that he never gave interviews and that he had no comments; but many persisted, and he grew uncomfortable. Upon learning from an usher that they had been assigned front-row seats—facing a battery of cameras—for a performances of Isaac Stern’s trio, Lindbergh balked. He arranged for a pair of seats several rows back. Anne found it difficult to lose herself in the Schubert that evening, feeling “too conscious of C.’s tense alertness beside me.”

  After the concert, as the guests dispersed, the Lindberghs were taken upstairs to rejoin the small group that had assembled before dinner. Charles conversed with Malraux, who spoke of his days as a military pilot and how he used to shoot from an open cockpit with a pistol. After a few minutes, the Lindberghs excused themselves, learning the next day that Isaac Stern had played the violin late into the nig
ht for those who had stayed.

  After breakfast in their room, the Lindberghs met Mrs. Kennedy in the informal alcove at the end of the hall. She brought her two young children. “Although talking chiefly to us,” Anne wrote in her diary, “she never forgot or brushed them aside…. This kind of confidence and closeness between mother and child cannot be faked. I was impressed that Mrs. Kennedy could maintain it in the midst of her public life and surroundings.” At the President’s suggestion, the Lindberghs departed by way of his office. Not only did it save them from the gauntlet of photographers waiting at the front door, but it allowed them to have a few private words with him.

  “We left with a deep feeling of gratitude and—even more—with encouragement,” Lindbergh wrote in his bread-and-butter letter. “There was a quality to the occasion, and the character you managed to weave through it, that brought out fundamental values at a time when such values seem to be disappearing in modern ways of life.” The whole occasion, and rereading parts of Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage, gave Lindbergh “confidence that the presidency of our country is held by someone who senses well beyond the more obvious problems of the days and year.” Anne sent an autographed copy of North to the Orient to young Caroline Kennedy, and Charles inscribed a copy of The Spirit of St. Louis—“in memory of an early meeting”—for her eighteen-month-old brother.

  As he suspected, that one public appearance prompted invitations for dozens more. Lindbergh withdrew into his shell. He refused to appear at the Fiftieth Anniversary dinner for the Boeing Company (“Many years ago I found that time consumed by dinner, ceremonies, etc., made it impossible for me to carry on the kind of life I wanted to lead …”); a reunion of his fellow Missouri National Guardsmen in the 110th Observation Squadron (“To me, reunions are pretty awful; they always detract from qualities of memory which I prefer to leave to the past where I think they belong and have the greatest value”); the American Astronautical Society’s award presentation (“I am deeply appreciative of the honors I have received in the past; but I feel that I have had far more than my share of them”); being installed in the Aviation Hall of Fame (“… personally I do not like the idea of enshrinement—it seems to me to separate one too much from the earth and its people”). He continued to ignore the commemorations of his flight to Paris which the National Air and Space Museum held every five years. He steadily declined offers for print interviews and was more resistant than ever to the pressure from television networks to appear on their programs. (“I am most anxious to continue living and working quietly, and I can think of nothing that would prevent this more than my appearance on television …”). Except to see occasional news events, he never even watched television.

  He still received thousands of fan letters each year, mostly from autograph-seekers. One day he calculated that if he handled one letter a minute, working eight hours a day, it would take him over five years just to handle such correspondence. As a result, during his layovers in Darien, Lindbergh gave himself time only to flip through the return addresses on the envelopes that had arrived, opening but one out of every ten or twenty letters. The rest would be opened by a secretary and filed, ultimately sent to Sterling, Memorial Library at Yale University, where his papers would become permanently housed. Even a mimeographed letter from the Easter Seals campaign would be placed in his archives … and, in the next folder, the sheets of Easter Seals themselves.

  Anne became less shy about accepting invitations on her own. Having struck up a friendship with Lady Bird Johnson at the Malraux dinner, she received several invitations from the Vice President’s wife for luncheons in Washington, which she attended. When the Johnsons moved into the White House, the Lindberghs remained high on Presidential guest lists. In 1964, Lindbergh voted for LBJ, marking the second time he had cast a Presidential ballot for a Democrat. (While he considered Goldwater “a well-intentioned, courageous, and honest man,” he found in his political rhetoric “a basic naiveté that I think would be highly dangerous, especially in international affairs.”) Lindbergh was “on the road” when two invitations from the LBJ White House arrived—one to meet Princess Margaret, the other the Shah of Iran. Anne sent their regrets to both—“because of the absence of Mr. Lindbergh from the country and Mrs. Lindbergh’s lack of knowledge of the date of his return or where to reach him.”

  By the mid-sixties, Lindbergh was roaming freer than ever. He let lapse his membership on most of his boards—including the Ballistic Missile Committee of the Department of Defense, which helped develop the Atlas, Titan, Thor, Minuteman, Polaris, and Jupiter missiles. He even turned down an invitation from Najeeb E. Halaby, Administrator of the Federal Aviation Agency, to assist the aviation industry in the development of an economically competitive, commercial supersonic transport aircraft. Not only did he not wish to be pinned down to fixed dates for committee meetings, he was also apprehensive about the wisdom of developing such a plane. “I have never before felt as little enthusiasm about a forward step in transport design,” he wrote Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara in 1966; “and yet, under existing circumstances, I see no wise alternative to taking it.” Calling himself a “low-cost, mass-transportation man,” Lindbergh hoped the developers of an SST might make its seat-mile cost feasible; but he was more disturbed by the potential problem of sonic booms. “I think we have enough noises and distractions without filling the sky with louder ones,” he said. “I am literally alarmed about our civilization’s infatuation with scientific developments, and the delicate complication of life thereby created.”

  Lindbergh felt that commercial aviation had already found the right balance of speed, safety, and passenger comfort. The trip from New York to Paris that had taken him thirty-three and a half hours was then being flown in Boeing 707-331s in six hours, forty-five minutes, sometimes an hour faster. The single-engine Spirit of St. Louis with its 450 gallons of gasoline had been replaced by Super Jets powered by four Pratt & Whitney JT4A-9 turbojet engines—with a gross weight of 302,000 pounds, sixty times their predecessor. Where one man had filled cockpit and cabin, squeezing in a sack of sandwiches and some emergency equipment, the 707 could accommodate twenty first-class passengers and 120 economy passengers—who were treated to hot gourmet meals and cocktails—a crew of twelve, 18,000 pounds of baggage, freight, and mail. Before the end of the decade, the Boeing 747, the first of the jumbo jets, would begin transporting five hundred passengers at a time. Its fuselage was 231 feet long, almost twice the distance covered by the Wright brothers’ first flight.

  On May 16, 1965, Lindbergh was elected to the Board of Directors of Pan American World Airways. He had served the company as a technical consultant for so many years that he had never considered the possibility of taking a directorship; but when his old friend Juan Trippe had asked if he might propose him for the position, he realized how perfectly it fit in with his vagabond life. The regular board meetings in New York and the frequent directors’ trips—two-week, round-the-world steeplechases—became the only appointments by which he fixed his calendar and set his watch. Increasingly, however, his global inspections disturbed him. As he confessed that year to Father Joseph T. Durkin, S. J. of Georgetown University, with whom he worked in collecting Dr. Carrel’s papers, “My recent trip, involving, mostly, discussions about coming types of transport aircraft, does not leave me less apprehensive about the complexity, tempo, and standards of success our civilization is achieving.”

  Nobody had a broader perspective on the earth’s physical changes over the past four decades than Charles Lindbergh. In making his forty-eight-state tour in 1927, he had seen the expanses of North American wilderness in a way no man had before. “The crushing impact of modern science and industry was only getting under way,” he would later note; but “civilization” rapidly encroached upon the land and the sea. What was more, Lindbergh increasingly shouldered the blame: “The primitive was at the mercy of the civilized in our twentieth-century times,” he would write, “and nothing had made it more so than the a
irplane I had helped develop. I had helped to change the environment of our lives.”

  As bad as the expansion which had overtaken most of the world’s great cities, Lindbergh found, was the standardization. “New buildings in Beirut, Rio, and Chicago looked the same,” he wrote. “Riots and crime in Washington were not unlike riots and crime in Manila.” He became “alarmed by the exponentially mounting complication, luxury, and cost of cities—not by the cost in money, but by the cost in irreplaceable resources of the earth.”

  “In the midst of the fascinating life I have led,” Lindbergh wrote in his early sixties, “taking part in man’s conquest of air and space, I have often asked myself whether aeronautics and astronautics were actually a boon to the human race.” To date, he concluded in a letter to Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, “I have been forced to the negative conclusion. While aircraft have brought peoples closer together in peaceful intercourse and understanding, they have more than counteracted this accomplishment through their ruthless bombardments in war—a killing that seems to have little or no relationship to evolution’s selectivity. While missiles have opened to our knowledge unexplored reaches of space, they have made our civilization subject to extermination within hours.”

  Believing that “an overemphasis of science weakens human character and upsets life’s essential balance,” the boy who had once worshiped technology admitted that were he just now entering adulthood, he would choose a career that kept him in contact with nature more than science. His new god became Thoreau, all of whose works he read and whose most inspiring passages he copied out. One phrase from Thoreau especially resonated for him: “… in wildness is the preservation of the World.” Lindbergh would thenceforth dedicate all his future journeys to his growing obsession with the survival of the planet. Increasingly, these voyages would take him into more primitive realms.